(no subject)
"You don't have to be a genius to work out that Aborigines are Australia's greatest social failing. For virtually ever indicator of prosperity and well-being--hospitalization rates, suicide rates, childhood mortality, imprisonment, employment, you name it-- the figures for Aborigines range from twice as bad to up to twenty times worse than for the general population.
According to John Pilger, Australia is the only developed nation that ranks high for incidence of trachoma--a viral disease that often leads to blindness--and it is almost exclusively an Aboriginal malady. Overall, the life expectancy of the average indigenous Australian is twenty years--twenty years--less than that of the average white Australian.
In Cairns, quite by chance, I had been told about a lawyer named Jim Brooks, who has worked for years for and with Aborigines, and I had managed to meet him for a cup of coffee in town...
A calm, easygoing, immediately likable man ...he runs the Native Title Rights Office in Cairns, which helps native peoples with land issues, and was one of the members of a human rights commission set up in the mid-1990s to investigate an unfortunate experiment in social engineering popularly known as the Stolen Generations.
This was an attempt by the government to lift Aboriginal children out of poverty and disadvantage by physically distancing them from their families and communities. No one knows the actual numbers, but between 1910 and 1970 between one-tenth and one-third of the Aboriginal children were taken from their parents and sent to foster homes or state training centers. The idea...was to prepare them for a more rewarding life in the white world. What was amazing about this was the legal mechanism that enabled it to be done. Until the 1960s in most Australian states, Aboriginal parents did not have legal custody of their own children. The state did. The state could take children from their homes at any time, on any basis it deemed appropriate, without apology or explanation.
"They did everything they could to eliminate contact between the parents and the children," Jim Brooks told me when we met. "We found one woman whose five children were sent to five different states. She had no way of keeping in touch with them, no way of knowing where they were, whether they were sick or well or happy or anything. Have you got kids?"
"Four," I said.
"Well, imagine if a government van turned up at your house one day and some inspector came to the door and told you they were taking your children. I mean seriously imagine how you would feel if you had to stand by and watch your children taken from your arms and put into a van. Imagine watching the van driving off down the road, with your kids crying for you, looking at you out the back window, and knowing that you will probably never see them again."
"Stop," I said with an uneasy stab at jocularity.
He smiled sympathetically at my discomfort. "And there is not a thing you can do about it. Nobody you can turn to. No court that will take your side. And this went on for decades."
"Why did they do it in such a heartless way?"
"They didn't see it as heartless. They thought they were doing a good thing." He passed me a precis of the rights commission's report, which he had brought for me, and showed me a quotation from early in the century by a traveling inspector named James Isdell, who wrote of the dispossessed parents: "No matter how frantic [their] momentary grief might be at the time, they will soon forget their off-spring."
"They sincerely believed that indigenous peoples were somehow immune to normal human emotions," Brooks said. He shrugged at the hopelessness of such thinking. "Very often the children were told their parents were dead; sometimes that the parents no longer wanted them. That was their way of helping them cope. Well, you can imagine the consequences. There was a lot of grief-related alcoholism, stratospheric levels of suicide, all that kind of stuff."
"What became of the kids?"
"The kids, meanwhile, were kept in care until they were sixteen or seventeen and then turned out into the community. They had a choice of staying in the cities and trying to cope with the inevitable prejudices or returning to their traditional communities and resuming a way of life that they could barely remember with people they no longer really know. The conditions for dysfunction and dislocation were bred into the system. You don't get rid of that overnight. You know, some people will tell you that the removal of children only affected a small proportion of indigenous families. That is wrong--there was scarcely a family in the land that wasn't affected at some profound and immediate level--but even more tragically it misses the point. Taking children away destroyed a whole continuity of relationships. Just because you stop that practice doesn't mean that all that damage is going to be magically undone and everything will be fine."
"So what can you do for them?" I asked.
"Help to give them a voice," he said. "That's all I can do." He shrugged, a little helplessly, and smiled.
I asked him if there was still much prejudice in Australia and he nodded. "Huge amounts," he said. "Really quite huge amounts, I'm afraid."
Over the past twenty years, successive governments have done quite a lot--or quite a lot compared with what was done before. They have restored large tracts of land to Aboriginal communities. They have returned Uluru to Aboriginal stewardship. They have spent more money on schools and clinics. They have introduced the usual initiatives for encouraging community projects and helping small businesses get started. None of this has made any difference at all to the statistics. Some have actually gotten worse.
At the end of the twentieth century an Aboriginal Australian was still eighteen times more likely to die from an infectious disease than a white Australian, and seventeen times more likely to be hospitalized as a result of violence. An Aboriginal baby remained two to four times more likely to die at birth depending on cause.
Above all, what is perhaps the oddest to the outsider is that Aborigines just aren't there. You don't see them performing on television; you don't find them assisting you in the shops. Only two Aborigines have ever served in Parliament; none has held a cabinet post. Indigenous peoples constitute only 1.5 percent of the Australian population and they live disproportionately in rural areas, so you wouldn't expect to see them in vast numbers anyway, but you would expect to see them sometimes--working in a bank, delivering mail, writing parking tickets, fixing a telephone line, participating in some productive capacity in the normal workaday world. I never have; not once. Clearly some connection is not being made.
As I sat now on the Todd Street Mall with my coffee and watched the mixed crowds - happy white shoppers with Saturday smiles and a spring in their step, shadowy Aborigines with their curious bandages and slow, swaying, knocked-about gait - I realized that I didn't have the faintest idea what the solution to all this was, what was required to spread the fruits of general Australian prosperity to those who seemed so signally unable to find their way to it. if I were contracted by the Commonwealth of Australia to advise on Aboriginal issues all I could write would be: "Do more. Try harder. Start now."
So without an original or helpful thought in my head, I just sat for some minutes and watched those poor disconnected people shuffle past. Then I did what most white Australians do. I read my newspaper and drank my coffee and didn't see them anymore."
-Exerpt from In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson
One of the few posts I don't make friends-only because I don't think there's enough light on this issue.
According to John Pilger, Australia is the only developed nation that ranks high for incidence of trachoma--a viral disease that often leads to blindness--and it is almost exclusively an Aboriginal malady. Overall, the life expectancy of the average indigenous Australian is twenty years--twenty years--less than that of the average white Australian.
In Cairns, quite by chance, I had been told about a lawyer named Jim Brooks, who has worked for years for and with Aborigines, and I had managed to meet him for a cup of coffee in town...
A calm, easygoing, immediately likable man ...he runs the Native Title Rights Office in Cairns, which helps native peoples with land issues, and was one of the members of a human rights commission set up in the mid-1990s to investigate an unfortunate experiment in social engineering popularly known as the Stolen Generations.
This was an attempt by the government to lift Aboriginal children out of poverty and disadvantage by physically distancing them from their families and communities. No one knows the actual numbers, but between 1910 and 1970 between one-tenth and one-third of the Aboriginal children were taken from their parents and sent to foster homes or state training centers. The idea...was to prepare them for a more rewarding life in the white world. What was amazing about this was the legal mechanism that enabled it to be done. Until the 1960s in most Australian states, Aboriginal parents did not have legal custody of their own children. The state did. The state could take children from their homes at any time, on any basis it deemed appropriate, without apology or explanation.
"They did everything they could to eliminate contact between the parents and the children," Jim Brooks told me when we met. "We found one woman whose five children were sent to five different states. She had no way of keeping in touch with them, no way of knowing where they were, whether they were sick or well or happy or anything. Have you got kids?"
"Four," I said.
"Well, imagine if a government van turned up at your house one day and some inspector came to the door and told you they were taking your children. I mean seriously imagine how you would feel if you had to stand by and watch your children taken from your arms and put into a van. Imagine watching the van driving off down the road, with your kids crying for you, looking at you out the back window, and knowing that you will probably never see them again."
"Stop," I said with an uneasy stab at jocularity.
He smiled sympathetically at my discomfort. "And there is not a thing you can do about it. Nobody you can turn to. No court that will take your side. And this went on for decades."
"Why did they do it in such a heartless way?"
"They didn't see it as heartless. They thought they were doing a good thing." He passed me a precis of the rights commission's report, which he had brought for me, and showed me a quotation from early in the century by a traveling inspector named James Isdell, who wrote of the dispossessed parents: "No matter how frantic [their] momentary grief might be at the time, they will soon forget their off-spring."
"They sincerely believed that indigenous peoples were somehow immune to normal human emotions," Brooks said. He shrugged at the hopelessness of such thinking. "Very often the children were told their parents were dead; sometimes that the parents no longer wanted them. That was their way of helping them cope. Well, you can imagine the consequences. There was a lot of grief-related alcoholism, stratospheric levels of suicide, all that kind of stuff."
"What became of the kids?"
"The kids, meanwhile, were kept in care until they were sixteen or seventeen and then turned out into the community. They had a choice of staying in the cities and trying to cope with the inevitable prejudices or returning to their traditional communities and resuming a way of life that they could barely remember with people they no longer really know. The conditions for dysfunction and dislocation were bred into the system. You don't get rid of that overnight. You know, some people will tell you that the removal of children only affected a small proportion of indigenous families. That is wrong--there was scarcely a family in the land that wasn't affected at some profound and immediate level--but even more tragically it misses the point. Taking children away destroyed a whole continuity of relationships. Just because you stop that practice doesn't mean that all that damage is going to be magically undone and everything will be fine."
"So what can you do for them?" I asked.
"Help to give them a voice," he said. "That's all I can do." He shrugged, a little helplessly, and smiled.
I asked him if there was still much prejudice in Australia and he nodded. "Huge amounts," he said. "Really quite huge amounts, I'm afraid."
Over the past twenty years, successive governments have done quite a lot--or quite a lot compared with what was done before. They have restored large tracts of land to Aboriginal communities. They have returned Uluru to Aboriginal stewardship. They have spent more money on schools and clinics. They have introduced the usual initiatives for encouraging community projects and helping small businesses get started. None of this has made any difference at all to the statistics. Some have actually gotten worse.
At the end of the twentieth century an Aboriginal Australian was still eighteen times more likely to die from an infectious disease than a white Australian, and seventeen times more likely to be hospitalized as a result of violence. An Aboriginal baby remained two to four times more likely to die at birth depending on cause.
Above all, what is perhaps the oddest to the outsider is that Aborigines just aren't there. You don't see them performing on television; you don't find them assisting you in the shops. Only two Aborigines have ever served in Parliament; none has held a cabinet post. Indigenous peoples constitute only 1.5 percent of the Australian population and they live disproportionately in rural areas, so you wouldn't expect to see them in vast numbers anyway, but you would expect to see them sometimes--working in a bank, delivering mail, writing parking tickets, fixing a telephone line, participating in some productive capacity in the normal workaday world. I never have; not once. Clearly some connection is not being made.
As I sat now on the Todd Street Mall with my coffee and watched the mixed crowds - happy white shoppers with Saturday smiles and a spring in their step, shadowy Aborigines with their curious bandages and slow, swaying, knocked-about gait - I realized that I didn't have the faintest idea what the solution to all this was, what was required to spread the fruits of general Australian prosperity to those who seemed so signally unable to find their way to it. if I were contracted by the Commonwealth of Australia to advise on Aboriginal issues all I could write would be: "Do more. Try harder. Start now."
So without an original or helpful thought in my head, I just sat for some minutes and watched those poor disconnected people shuffle past. Then I did what most white Australians do. I read my newspaper and drank my coffee and didn't see them anymore."
-Exerpt from In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson
One of the few posts I don't make friends-only because I don't think there's enough light on this issue.